Now that 2024 is over, people are looking back at the year and analyzing the state of cinema based on what’s been released, what happened at the box office, and what critics and audiences have gravitated to. Part of this postmortem has been a critique of increasingly bloated budgets for Hollywood movies which are beginning to underperform or outright bomb at the box office, while some films comparatively succeed thanks to minuscule budgets. It’s not just a question of quantity vs. quality, as in many cases, studios can produce more quality films for less than the cost of a single, lower-quality film that’s more mainstream. The clearest evidence of this is the fact that A24 produced 16 films for nearly the same cost of Red One‘s budget.
Every narrative feature film from A24 in 2024 collectively cost nearly the same as the budget of ‘Red One,’ and made more money than it, too. Read More